Notes on usability and related things by a project manager who manages electronic publishing projects.

September 14, 2006

More about caching

Since I posted yesterday's item about caching problems, I have had a interesting suggestion: it might be possible to get around this by requesting pages though a web proxy server. Such services exist on the web for free (you might have some adverts floated on top of your page) - they are largely aimed at peole who want to browse anonymously, but should mean that my ISP can't tell that I am once more after a page they have cached.

This wikipedia article about proxy servers includes links to such services. Do also read the bits of the article about abuse: if you go via a proxy server you cannot tell who might be intercepting your data, so it might be unwise to use this if you will be inputting personal details such as passwords

Note added 19 Sept: another tip I have received is that it may be possible to order your ISP to flush its cache. You can do this from the Run prompt in he Start menu of Windows ( go Start >> Run >> and then type ipconfig /flushdns in the Run input box). Microsoft have a note about this procedure. And here is some stuff about other ipconfig commands